1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and article of manufacture for allocating data sets to a container data set.
2. Description of the Related Art
In certain computing environments, multiple host systems may communicate with a control unit (CU) (also known as a storage controller, storage subsystem, enterprise storage server, etc.) providing access to storage devices, such as interconnected hard disk drives through one or more logical paths. The interconnected drives may be configured as a Direct Access Storage Device (DASD), Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID), Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD), etc. The control unit may configure one or more logical subsystems (LSSs), where each LSS is configured to include multiple volumes.
The host systems include operating systems, middleware (such as databases) and applications that translate data requests from applications into an address that may be presented to the control unit. The control unit translates the received address into a physical location on a storage device from which to access the requested data. For instance, in certain environments, the host operating system presents an address having a cylinder number, track number, and record number in a specific format.
Certain operating systems allow the host operating system in coordination with the control unit to allocate any size data sets in a first portion of an address space of the storage, but data sets allocated in a second portion of the address space must be allocated a minimum file allocation size, even if the data set being allocated contains substantially less data than the minimum file allocation size, resulting in unused storage space allocated to the data set.
There is a need in the art for improved techniques for allocating data sets in an address space.